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Overview

Witches are real—and each of us may be one—in this all-new paranormal suspense novel from#1 New York Times bestselling author Christopher Pike.

Heading off for a weekend in Las Vegas with her friends, Jessie Ralle has only one worry—how to make it through the road trip in the same car with her Ex, Jimmy Kelter. The guy who broke her heart five months ago when he dumped her for no reason. The guy who’s finally ready to tell her why he did it, because he wants her back.

But what Jessie doesn’t realize is that Jimmy is the least of her problems.

In Las Vegas she meets Russ, a mesmerizing stranger who shows her how to gamble, and who never seems to lose. Curious, Jessie wants to know his secret, and in response, alone in his hotel room, he teaches her a game that opens a door to another reality.

To Witch World.

Suddenly Jessie discovers that she’s stumbled into a world where some people can do the impossible, and others may not even be human. For a time she fears she’s lost her mind. Are there really witches? Is she one of them?

#1 Bestselling author Christopher Pike offers up another classic edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that keeps you guessing right until the last page.

About the Author

Christopher Pike is a bestselling author of young adult novels. The Thirst series, The Secret of Ka, and the Remember Me and Alosha trilogies are some of his favorite titles. He is also the author of several adult novels, including Sati and The Season of Passage. Thirst and Alosha are slated to be released as feature films. Pike currently lives in Santa Barbara, where it is rumored he never leaves his house. But he can be found online at Facebook.com/ChristopherPikeBooks.

Read an Excerpt

Red Queen

ONCE I BELIEVED THAT I wanted nothing more than love. Someone who would care for me more than he cared for himself. A guy who would never betray me, never lie to me, and most of all never leave me. Yeah, that was what I desired most, what people usually call true love.

I don’t know if that has really changed.

Yet I have to wonder now if I want something else just as badly.

What is it? You must wonder . . .

Magic. I want my life filled with the mystery of magic.

Silly, huh? Most people would say there’s no such thing.

Then again, most people are not witches.

Not like me.

I discovered what I was when I was eighteen years old, two days after I graduated high school. Before then I was your typical teenager. I got up in the morning, went to school, stared at my ex-boyfriend across the campus courtyard and imagined what it would be like to have him back in my life, went to the local library and sorted books for four hours, went home, watched TV, read a little, lay in bed and thought some more about Jimmy Kelter, then fell asleep and dreamed.

But I feel, somewhere in my dreams, I sensed I was different from other girls my age. Often it seemed, as I wandered the twilight realms of my unconscious, that I existed in another world, a world like our own and yet different, too. A place where I had powers my normal, everyday self could hardly imagine.

I believe it was these dreams that made me crave that elusive thing that is as great as true love. It’s hard to be sure, I only know that I seldom awakened without feeling a terrible sense of loss. As though my very soul had been chopped into pieces and tossed back into the world. The sensation of being on the “outside” is difficult to describe. All I can say is that, deep inside, a part of me always hurt.

I used to tell myself it was because of Jimmy. He had dumped me, all of a sudden, for no reason. He had broken my heart, dug it out of my chest, and squashed it when he said I really like you, Jessie, we can still be friends, but I’ve got to go now. I blamed him for the pain. Yet it had been there before I had fallen in love with him, so there had to be another reason why it existed.

Now I know Jimmy was only a part of the equation.

But I get ahead of myself. Let me begin, somewhere near the beginning.

Like I said, I first became aware I was a witch the same weekend I graduated high school. At the time I lived in Apple Valley, which is off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. How that hick town got that name was beyond me. Apple Valley was smack in the middle of the desert. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it’s easier to believe in witches than in apple trees growing in that godforsaken place.

Still, it was home, the only home I had known since I was six. That was when my father the doctor had decided that Nurse Betty—that was what my mom called her—was more sympathetic to his needs than my mother. From birth to six I lived in a mansion overlooking the Pacific, in a Malibu enclave loaded with movie stars and the studio executives who had made them famous. My mom, she must have had a lousy divorce lawyer, because even though she had worked her butt off to put my father through medical school and a six-year residency that trained him to be one of the finest heart surgeons on the West Coast, she was kicked out of the marriage with barely enough money to buy a two-bedroom home in Apple Valley. And with summer temperatures averaging above a hundred, real estate was never a hot item in our town.

I was lucky I had skin that gladly suffered the sun. It was soft, and I tanned deeply without peeling. My coloring probably helped. My family tree is mostly European, but there was an American Indian in the mix back before the Civil War.

Chief Proud Feather. You might wonder how I know his name, and that’s good—wonder away, you’ll find out, it’s part of my story. He was 100 percent Hopi, but since he was sort of a distant relative, he gave me only a small portion of my features. My hair is brown with a hint of red. At dawn and sunset it is more maroon than anything else. I have freckles and green eyes, but not the green of a true redhead. My freckles are few, often lost in my tan, and my eyes are so dark the green seems to come and go, depending on my mood.

There wasn’t much green where I grew up. The starved branches on the trees on our campus looked as if they were always reaching for the sky, praying for rain.

I was pretty; for that matter, I still am pretty. Understand, I turned eighteen a long time ago. Yet I still look much the same. I’m not immortal, I’m just very hard to kill. Of course, I could die tonight, who’s to say.

It was odd, as a bright and attractive senior in high school, I wasn’t especially popular. Apple Valley High was small—our graduating class barely topped two hundred. I knew all the seniors. I had memorized the first and last name of every cute boy in my class, but I was seldom asked out. I used to puzzle over that fact. I especially wondered why James Kelter had dumped me after only ten weeks of what, to me, had felt like the greatest relationship in the world. I was to find out when our class took that ill-fated trip to Las Vegas.

Our weekend in Sin City was supposed to be the equivalent of our Senior All-Night Party. I know, on the surface that sounds silly. A party usually lasts one night, and our parents believed we were spending the night at the local Hilton. However, the plan was for all two hundred of us to privately call our parents in the morning and say we had just been invited by friends to go camping in the mountains that separated our desert from the LA Basin.

The scheme was pitifully weak. Before the weekend was over, most of our parents would know we’d been nowhere near the mountains. That didn’t matter. In fact, that was the whole point of the trip. We had decided, as a class, to throw all caution to the wind and break all the rules.

The reason such a large group was able to come to such a wild decision was easy to understand if you considered our unusual location. Apple Valley was nothing more than a road stop stuck between the second largest city in the nation—LA—and its most fun city—Las Vegas. For most of our lives, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings, we watched as thousands of cars flew northeast along Interstate 15 toward good times, while we remained trapped in a fruit town that didn’t even have fruit trees.

So when the question arose of where we wanted to celebrate our graduation, all our years of frustration exploded. No one cared that you had to be twenty-one to gamble in the casinos. Not all of us were into gambling and those who were simply paid Ted Pollack to make them fake IDs.

Ted made my ID for free. He was an old friend. He lived a block over from my house. He had a terrible crush on me, one I wasn’t supposed to know about. Poor Ted, he confided everything in his heart to his sister, Pam, who kept secrets about as well as the fifty-year-old gray parrot that lived in their kitchen. It was dangerous to talk in front of that bird, just as it was the height of foolishness to confide in Pam.

I wasn’t sure why Ted cared so deeply about me. Of course, I didn’t understand why I cared so much about Jimmy. At eighteen I understood very little about love, and it’s a shame I wasn’t given a chance to know more about it before I was changed. That’s something I’ll always regret.

That particular Friday ended up being a wasteland of regrets. After a two-hour graduation ceremony that set a dismal record for scorching heat and crippling boredom, I learned from my best friend, Alex Simms, that both Ted and Jimmy would be driving with us to Las Vegas. Alex told me precisely ten seconds after I collected my blue-and-gold cap off the football field—after our class collectively threw them in the air—and exactly one minute after our school principal had pronounced us full-fledged graduates.

“You’re joking, right?” I said.

Alex brushed her short blond hair from her bright blues. She wasn’t as pretty as me but that didn’t stop her from acting like she was. The weird thing is, it worked for her. Even though she didn’t have a steady boyfriend, she dated plenty, and there wasn’t a guy in school who would have said no to her if she’d so much as said hi. A natural flirt, she could touch a guy’s hand and make him feel like his fingers were caressing her breasts.

Alex was a rare specimen, a compulsive talker who knew when to shut up and listen. She had a quick wit—some would say it was biting—and her self-confidence was legendary. She had applied to UCLA with a B-plus average and a slightly above-average SAT score and they had accepted her—supposedly—on the strength of her interview. While Debbie Pernal, a close friend of ours, had been turned down by the same school despite a straight-A average and a very high SAT score.

It was Debbie’s belief that Alex had seduced one of the interviewing deans. In Debbie’s mind, there was no other explanation for how Alex had gotten accepted. Debbie said as much to anyone who would listen, which just happened to be the entire student body. Her remarks started a tidal wave of a rumor: “ALEX IS A TOTAL SLUT!” Of course, the fact that Alex never bothered to deny the slur didn’t help matters. If anything, she took great delight in it.

And these two were friends.

Debbie was also driving with us to Las Vegas.

“There was a mix-up,” Alex said without much conviction, trying to explain why Jimmy was going to ride in the car with us. “We didn’t plan for both of them to come.”

“Why would anyone in their right mind put Jimmy and me together in the same car?” I demanded.

Alex dropped all pretense. “Could it be that I’m sick and tired of you whining about how he dumped you when everything was going so perfect between you two?”

I glared at her. “We’re best friends! You’re required to listen to my whining. It doesn’t give you the right to invite the one person in the whole world who ripped my heart out to go on a road trip with us.”

“What road trip? We’re just giving him a three-hour ride. You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to.”

“Right. The five of us are going to be crammed into your car half the afternoon and it will be perfectly normal if I don’t say a word to the first and last guy I ever had sex with.”

Alex was suddenly interested. “I didn’t know Jimmy was your first. You always acted like you slept with Clyde Barker.”

Clyde Barker was our football quarterback and so good-looking that none of the girls who went to the games—myself included—cared that he couldn’t throw a pass to save his ass. He had the IQ of a cracked helmet. “It was just an act,” I said with a sigh.

“Look, it might work out better than you think. My sources tell me Jimmy has hardly been seeing Kari at all. They may even be broken up.”

Kari Rider had been Jimmy’s girlfriend before me, and after me, which gave me plenty of reason to hate the bitch.

“Why don’t we be absolutely sure and invite Kari as well,” I said. “She can sit on my lap.”

Alex laughed. “Admit it, you’re a tiny bit happy I did all this behind your back.”

“I’m a tiny bit considering not going at all.”

“Don’t you dare. Ted would be devastated.”

“Ted’s going to be devastated when he sees Jimmy get in your car!”

Alex frowned. “You have a point. Debbie invited him, not me.”

On top of everything else, Debbie had a crush on Ted, the same Ted who had a crush on me. It was going to be a long three hours to Las Vegas.

“Did Debbie think it was a good idea for Jimmy to ride with us?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I was aghast. “I can’t believe it. That bitch.”

“Well, actually, she didn’t think there was a chance in hell he’d come.”

That hurt. “Love the vote of confidence. What you mean is Debbie didn’t think there was a chance in hell Jimmy was still interested in me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. But you both thought it.”

“Come on, Jessie. It’s obvious Jimmy’s coming with us so he can spend time with you.” Alex patted me on the back. “Be happy.”

“Why did you wait until now to tell me this?”

“Because now it’s too late to change my devious plan.”

I dusted off my blue-and-gold cap and put it back on. “I suppose this is your graduation present to me?” I asked.

“Sure. Where’s mine?”

“You’ll get it when we get to Las Vegas.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’ll see.” I already had a feeling I was going to pay her back, I just didn’t know how.

Editorial Reviews

In this bloated series launch from the prolific Pike, when Jessie accompanies her graduating class to Las Vegas for the weekend, she meets a mysterious man with a knack for winning at cards. Soon after, Jessie is killed, but she returns to life to learn that she's a witch with superhuman abilities, able to dwell in two different worlds at once. What follows is a muddied sequence of events involving alternate realities and people with multiple counterparts. As Jessie learns the truth about her heritage, reconciles with her boyfriend, and fights to save the daughter she never knew she had, she gets further entangled in a millennia-old battle between two opposing witch factions. Readers may struggle with Jessie's convoluted narration ("Anyway, the first time we had sex, that was important. It had been in the shower, like I told him, or rather, just after we took a shower. But he was right about one thinghe had not spent time in the shower washing the oil off his hands"), and Pike's premise is needlessly complicated. A chaotic jumble of supernatural tropes. Agent: Jennifer Unter, the Unter Agency. Ages 14–up. (Nov.)

Jessica Ralle expected her graduation trip to Las Vegas to go smoothly--a little bit of drinking, some entertainment and a smidge of gambling before going off to UCLA--but…. The plan derails when she meets Russ, a dangerous man who shows her the arts of blackjack and of a mysterious new card game, 22. After blacking out when she is locked in a freezer, Jessie wakes up in the morgue and discovers she is in a different world, one in which she has special abilities built into her genetic sequence. When Jessie learns a sinister organization has kidnapped the daughter she bore in the alternate world, she embarks on a mission of vengeance to recover her child. Pike's knack for melodrama is in evidence, but the worldbuilding never takes off here. Jessica adapts to her dual nature much too easily and adjusts to her role as mother with little disconnect. The main villain, a holdover from the Roman Empire, is laughably evil, and readers will find her Achilles' heel to be utterly banal. Underdeveloped characters, a dull plot with high page count and hollow moralizing make for very little to recommend. (Thriller. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews

Gr 10 Up—Jessie Ralle starts out as a typical teenager with a complicated love life. She and some friends, including her ex, all head to Las Vegas to celebrate graduation. Strange things start to happen, culminating in Jessie's getting murdered and mysteriously brought back to life-with superpowers. As if that weren't enough, she finds herself in a parallel version of Vegas. Luckily, her long-lost father turns up to explain everything. Less luckily, there is a lot of explaining to do. It turns out that Jessie is a witch, or a human with superpowered genetics. Now that she has "connected" to her true nature (by dying), she will start experiencing life in dual universes: one day in the regular world followed by the same day in the witch world. There are also two versions of herself, Jessie and Jessica, and Jessica, the witch version, has a baby named Lara who has been kidnapped by a rival group of witches who are trying to take over the world and … so on. The complications of the two universes and the fact that all of the characters have two versions of themselves make the already-convoluted plot completely unmanageable. Also off-putting is the way that the rules of Witch World seem to be inconsistently applied and the characters, including the protagonist, are frequently unsympathetic. Though the book is written for teens, the characters talk and act like adults, and there is no shortage of sex and violence, making the novel most appropriate for older teens. Even the most dedicated Pike fans may have trouble making their way through this messy tome.—Eliza Langhans, Hatfield Public Library, MA

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I've been a Christopher Pike fan since Thirst. And all I have to say about Witch World is WOW!!!! Not only is Christopher Pike one of my favorite authors, witches are very interesting to read about. When I saw this book, I bought it immediaetly. I just picked it up, went to the cash register amd paid for it just like that. i am looking forward to the sequels to Witch World and I am arelly excited for Thirst #5.

clambakecat

More than 1 year ago

great series so imaginative I can't wait for the second installment.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Very intriguing

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

I have been a fan of this author for many years and he didn't disappoint me with this new series. I just can't stand having to wait for book #2 in the series.

Erlessard

More than 1 year ago

This was an extremely hard review to write. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Pike's Remember Me and The Last Vampire (now called Thirst) series and I debated whether to review this book at all. I still LOVE Christopher Pike as an author, but Witch World was probably his worst written book to date. My expectations from the latest book by one of my favorite authors were sky high, which may account for how disappointed I was while reading it.
The book starts off slow. Jessie is a quiet girl who's heading to Vegas with the rest of her senior class, including her ex-boyfriend, Jimmy. Apparently, he's with his current girlfriend, Kari, because she got pregnant, and within the last few days, their baby was stillborn, so he's once again available. Instead of taking advantage of Jimmy in his fragile state, she meets up and shags a high roller named Russell, who magically always knows how to play his next hand of Blackjack.
At this point, the book is okay. It's reading like a contemporary novel and I'm wondering when the supernatural stuff will happen. There's a bit of a lag in the pace when Russell explains the game of Twenty Two, but when Jessie is kidnapped, the action is amazing! There are five star sections of this book that remind me why I love to read Christopher Pike's books, but they're suffocated by the info dumps that plague the second half of the book. Every character has their full background explained in a dry Q &amp; A style. After Jessie &quot;learns&quot; about Witch World, her personality becomes robotic and everything is a reaction. There's no emotions at all in her narrative. Considering what's going on with Laura, it makes me question how believable she is as a character.
By the end of the book, Jessie reminds me of Sita (main character in the Thirst series) with the way she reacts to every situation. I'm not quite sure how she evolved into that character, but I'm sad that the quiet little girl at the beginning of the story is 100% gone by the end.
The plot of the story is the only thing that kept me from DNFing this book. I loved the concept of Witch World. I enjoyed many of the minor characters. I even enjoyed the twists at the end (although some were predictable). I think that the potential for me to love the story was there, but there were things that were over-explained, character profiles/histories that clogged up the narrative, and the main character turned me with her lack of character.
Overall, I can't recommend Witch World. If you're new to Christopher Pike, check out one of his other series instead.

Sarah_UK1

More than 1 year ago

(Source: I borrowed a copy of this book.)
Jessie and her friends (including her ex-boyfriend Jimmy) are heading off to Las Vegas for a weekend, but spending time with her ex-boyfriend is going to turn out to be the least of Jessie&rsquo;s problems during this trip.
Using a fake ID to get into a casino and play blackjack, Jessie and her best friend Alex sit down to play, when a high roller comes to the table. His name is Russell, and his winning streak is unbelievable. When Alex storms off in a huff, Jessie moves closer to Russell, and with his help wins almost $60,000 (when she started with $20).
On her way to see Russell again the next day, Jessie somehow ends up kidnapped, and locked in a meat locker &ndash; slowly freezing to death. Only to then wake up later in a morgue, about to get a front row set at her own autopsy!
Somehow managing to wake herself up, Jessie leaves the morgue (giving the poor necrophiliac pathologist a heart attack), and makes her way back to the strip to find Russell. But things don&rsquo;t seem right &ndash; the gamblers in the casinos are playing 22 &lsquo;red queen&rsquo;, rather than 21 &lsquo;blackjack&rsquo;.
Eventually finding Russell again, Jessie finds out the truth &ndash; there are two parallel worlds &ndash; the normal world, and witch world, and Jessie is a witch. Jessie has 7 of 10 witch genes, and killing her and allowing her to return from the dead was a way to &lsquo;wake-up&rsquo; her witch genes.
Even more shocking is the reason that Jessie has been &lsquo;woken up&rsquo; &ndash; she has a daughter &ndash; Lara, who was born with all 10 witch genes (which has never happened before), and has been kidnapped by the bad witches of Witch world.
What is really going on though? What do the bad witches want with Lara? How is Jessie supposed to help get her daughter back? And what other shocks are in store for Jessie?
When I started reading this book I thought I was going to love it, it instantly sucked me in, and the first 50 pages flew by. Unfortunately this was not the case for the rest of the book.
After Jessie wins the money, things start to become strange. First Jessie gets frozen to death in a meat locker &ndash; I&rsquo;m thinking &lsquo;What? Where did this come from?&rsquo;
Then she wakes up as her autopsy is about to be performed, and I&rsquo;m thinking &lsquo;Seriously? Where did this come from?&rsquo;
The she starts beating people up, people start calling her &lsquo;mother&rsquo;, and when she eventually finds Russell again, he started telling her that she is a witch. So at this point I&rsquo;m a little disbelieving of this storyline, but I decide to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Then something even more unbelievable happens &ndash; Jessie&rsquo;s father talks to her on the phone (who she hasn&rsquo;t spoken to for years), and tells her that the reason that he had to have her killed to reawaken her witch genes, is because someone has kidnapped her daughter. Daughter? Seriously? I mean she&rsquo;s only 18 herself &ndash; and suddenly she has a daughter? This just didn&rsquo;t fit with the story at all, and I seriously wondered if I wanted to read the rest of this book.
So, after a break I decided I&rsquo;d give it the benefit of the doubt again, and keep reading. Things just got worse though, Jessie tries to convince Jimmy (her ex-boyfriend) that she&rsquo;s a witch, and he&rsquo;s a witch, and things get even weirder. They find some kid with a tail out in the desert surrounding Las Vegas, and take him back to the city for Jessie&rsquo;s father (who has now flown in) to give him a physical, and then there&rsquo;s a lot more discussion of who the bad guys are, what they want, what they hope to gain by kidnapping Jessie&rsquo;s daughter etc. At this point I am seriously hitting my head into the wall just trying to get such a ridiculous story out of my head. I mean, I really wish I had never even started reading this drivel.
I did try to finish this book, but I just couldn&rsquo;t. I really could not bring myself to finish this, the story was just so unbelievable, and I was just so bored!
I did read the epilogue, which just told me that the story didn&rsquo;t end with a happily ever after, and that there is going to be a second book after this one! Believe me, I will definitely not be reading that!
This was my first Christopher Pike novel, and will most probably be my last.
Overall; unbelievable and ultimately boring. Someone else might enjoy this book, but I really didn&rsquo;t.
3.5 out of 10.

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